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À Barcelone, pendant la première étape de l'industrialisation, la plupart des conflits entre patrons et travailleurs sont en rapport avec l'autonomie des ouvriers qualifiés, menacée par le nouveau système des usines, ou avec les changements dans les politiques de valorisation des rendements. Ces conflits se développent très tôt dans le secteur principal de l'industrialisation : le textile cotonnier et plus particulièrement le filage. Ce sont les ouvriers de ce secteur qui les premiers revendiquent un salaire dit « familial », avant que cette aspiration ne s'étende à toute la classe ouvrière barcelonaise. Nous savons comment les discours sur la capacité des salaires masculins à couvrir seuls la subsistance de la famille se sont progressivement répandus dans d'autres secteurs, avec l'appui des élites intellectuelles krausistes, hygiénistes et catholiques sociales. Mais nous connaissons peu leur portée réelle auprès des classes ouvrières de la seconde moitié du XIX e siècle. Cet article analyse la diffusion de la figure du « gagne-pain » à Barcelone pendant la période 1856-1917, en s'appuyant sur la reconstitution des budgets familiaux des ouvriers du secteur textile, secteur le plus important de l'industrialisation catalane et barcelonaise.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Spain experienced growing social instability. The worsening working conditions stimulated social conflict and the rise of the labour movement. In this context, the first voices in favour of state intervention in conflicts between capital and labour arose among the reformist intellectual elite. One of the first social policy measures undertaken by the state was the creation, in 1883, of the Comisión de Reformas Sociales (Commission for Social Reforms, CRS) as a consultative and advisory institution of the government on social issues. Under the influence of positivist methods of empirical sociology, the commission's first initiative was to conduct a survey with the objective of undertaking a detailed diagnosis of the living conditions of the working population. Changing gender relations in the family and labour market, especially the conflicts over the use of women's time, was one of the central questions in this survey. Thus, its results allow us to analyse both the discourses – by social reformers and other social groups – and the social practices of women at work in different sectors and in different parts of Spain.

Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises. Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks. Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the 'dead' season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty.

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn't. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors